Support for ETHPlanet's ecosystem building initiatives in China, including working with students and universities, events, community organization, and educational resources.
Development of a curriculum and course to train university students and professors to become educators in Ethereum development, aiming to provide them with a foundation to lead educational initiatives at their respective universities.
Applying topological data analysis techniques to aspects of the beacon chain network including visualization of validator behavior, insights into the structure and health of the p2p network, and inspection of key consensus metrics.
Continued development the Lodestar JS beacon chain client, with goals including light client R&D, improved tooling and documentation, and preparation for the Altair hardfork.
Continued development of the Prysm client, focusing on beacon chain production support and refinement, as well as R&D on Altair, the Merge, and Sharding.
Website resources documenting and demonstrating the SSZ serialization standard, including a visualization playground and React-based SSZ implementation.
Consensus Layer
tPlonk
Christian Rechberger
Research and development on tPlonk, a SNARK-friendly lookup based hash function.
Development of a protocol for secure, anonymous, and verifiable voting technology, as well as additional zero knowledge R&D and enterprise adoption efforts.
Continued work on Dark Forest, a decentralized and persistent RTS (real-time strategy) game, demonstrating use of zk-snarks to construct “incomplete information” environments where users can keep a private state while publicly submitting verifiably valid actions. Dark Forest was created to demonstrate the capability of this framework to create complex environmental and strategic dynamics in decentralized gaming.
Extensions to MicroMix, an ETH and ERC-20 mixer built on Semaphore, including the ability to deploy a new contract for any denomination, a mixer registry to avoid splitting liquidity, enablig layer 2 deployment, and a fully open-source and non-minified user interface.
Security assessment of the Optimism codebase, resulting in a report detailling Optimism's design and code structure and pointing out security vulnerabilites.
Design and specification for a reputation proving service that exports cryptographic proofs of user attributes from existing sites where users have accrued reputation such as Github or Twitter, which can be verified by sites or decentralized applications.
Development of a reputation proving service that exports cryptographic proofs of user attributes from existing sites (such as Github or Twitter) to be verified by sites or decentralized applications.
Design a smart contract requiring users on a Unirep-based private and decentralized social media platform to risk reputation in order to post, with any post resulting in a reduction or addition of their total reputation score.
Design for a trustless data market using a smart contract to allow encrypted data to be published for sale, while buyers can confirm authenticity using a segment of exposed data and a ZKP issued by the seller.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
Zkopru Stress Testing
Stress testing, monitoring tools, CI setup and cluster testing scripts for Zkopru, a layer-2 scaling solution for private transactions using zk-SNARK and optimistic rollup.
Developer experience & tooling
ETH Winter Education Resources
Nick Ulven
Conversion of resources from the ETH Winter program, including Intro to Eth documents, mentor reading lists and quests, into a publicly consumable format.
Development of a super-optimizer for Ethereum smart contracts that optimizes block-by-block by searching for instruction sequences that are semantically equivalent to the original sequence in the block but consume less gas, aiming to reduce overall transaction costs and increase transaction capacity.
Software engine for game theoretic modelling of compositional games, e.g. auction mechanisms or governance structures, using Compositional Game Theory.
Funding for Baseline Grants supporting research, development and adoption of the Baseline protocol, which allows businesses to synchronize their systems of record and reduce costly errors in B2B transactions.
Development of a production-ready version of clr.fund, a decentralized quadratic funding protocol using BrightID and MACI to to enable permissionless, pseudonymous, and minimally-trustful protocol-level funding for Ethereum.
Deep review of a research paper titled “Big primes make me high: New results on biprimality testing” by Dmitry Khovratovich and Mary Maller, to validate a breakthrough result in biprimality testing which could facilitate large scale RSA MPCs.
